Using the Technology Design Process to Enhance the Senior Capstone Project Experience

An excerpt of the paper published in the International Journal of Engineering Education (Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 195–203, 2021), describing how the Senior Capstone Project experience can be enhanced to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the technology development process to the students and prepare them to develop projects that meet their client’s expectations.

It is a widely-held belief among engineering academics that the senior project experience is highly beneficial to graduates as they begin their careers. These projects help students develop knowledge and transferable skills, learn across context, and solve industry problems. 

Common critiques by employers, however, indicate these projects may be missing the mark, as they lack engagement with target customers and stakeholders and few projects make it to the pilot testing stage or deployment. Without a more complete understanding and appreciation of the entire technology development process, there is a gap between what students know at graduation and what they need to know in order to be successful.

We therefore set out to investigate how the senior engineering student project experience can be enhanced so students gain a more complete understanding and appreciation of the entire technology development process, develop more skills needed in their first jobs, and become more capable of developing projects that meet their client’s expectations. Here it is in a nutshell:

Questions, we had questions

We started off by interviewing more than 100 engineering hiring managers and inquiring about the skills they look for in new hires for entry-level engineering positions. Hiring managers were asked to rank the importance of 12 engineering skills areas, ranging from “soft skills,” such as problem solving and communication, to “hard skills,” like CAD use and cost analysis.

Next, we interviewed senior engineering students (more than 20 students from 5 teams) who had completed their senior design project—which involved taking an idea from a concept to a design and finally to a prototype—in May 2018. Among other things, interviewees reported collecting very little first-hand needs data from likely customer groups; their approaches were largely based on second-hand information. One team reported they “…focused on design and consider[ed] manufacturing out of the scope of [their] project. [They saw] manufacturing as another, separate project.”

Here’s an opportunity

These student sentiments highlighted their general lack of understanding of the end goal of  engineering. In order to bring a project from ideation to deployment, design and manufacturing cannot be separated.

Armed with the insight as to where we were coming up short in the process of utilizing the senior project experience to set up our students for success, we theorized that a solution to building a stronger engineering talent pipeline should incorporate instruction on the technology development process, which is the progression from concept to deployment through observing problems, perceiving needs, and developing a concept into a product or service.

Making it happen

We developed a workshop approach for helping students enhance the skills needed in their first jobs, offering them a broader understanding and appreciation of the entire technology development process, and helping them develop projects that better meet their clients’ expectations. Follow-up sessions to review and critique workshop-related homework assignments were integral to the process.

Workshop #1 covered how to translate customers’ needs into technical requirements and design parameters and was presented after the students had identified their concept. Workshop #2 took place during the design process and before prototyping began; it taught the students how to move a new product from design to prototype based on manufacturing possibilities and limitations. Workshop #3 focused on pilot studies—an essential step for testing and enhancing product design and prototypes before production and deployment.

The three workshops were held in the 2018-19 academic year. Seven senior design teams over the course of the academic year, with one workshop held during each of the first three quarters, participated in this series of workshops. The workshops were not mandatory for all senior design teams, but were highly recommended.

And, the results are in...

In May 2019, we conducted a set of interviews with seven senior engineering project teams (more than 20 students) that participated in the inaugural workshops. In all cases, the students interviewed in 2019 showed greater use of the workshop skills compared to the students interviewed the previous year, promising to usher in more prepared engineers to the workforce.

Final thoughts

Enhancing the preparation of students for engineering careers begins with understanding the needs of the organizations that will hire them. Hiring managers identified their top skill needs and we sought to incorporate these needs into the senior engineering student project experience via supplementary workshops.

Teaching students to put the technology development process to work in their design process helps equip them to be successful as they start their careers. Our preliminary results show that adding instruction and experience in customer needs assessment, manufacturing engineering, and pilot testing into the senior project experience can strengthen the preparedness of graduating seniors and help bridge the gaps between what students learn and what they need to know as entry-level engineers.

The paper was authored by Gregory Theyel (Program Director of the Biomedical Manufacturing Network), Allan Baez Morales (Director of Programs and Partnerships for the Frugal Innovation Hub at Santa Clara University), Evangelia Bouzos (Assistant Program Manager at the Frugal Innovation Hub and the BioInnovation and Design Lab at Santa Clara University), and Prashanth Asuri (Director of the BioInnovation and Design Lab and Associate Professor of Bioengineering at  Santa Clara University).